Friday, September 01, 2017

Counterpunch | Much of this turn toward no authority beyond one’s own opinion, truth
as a narrative, alternative facts, and reality and reason as
self-designed came to fruition cataclysmically with Donald Trump’s
presidential campaign and his election, most stupefying for some and
exhilarating for others. I refer to a cataclysm because regardless of
what Trump narrative you are in, his election is an event both
surprising and momentous. The narrative divide here is not over policy
but personality as those on both the Democrat and Republican side wonder
how such a man can be president and what kind of people would vote for
him as president. Although there have been countless armchair
psychiatric exams of Trump, he yet remains outside an established
political frame of understanding. You have to switch jump into another
story frame to make him real, a jump to the spinscape of Reality TV and
the hyperreal of celebrity and enormous wealth that infects the American
cultural imaginary.

This is a jump every Trump supporter made; into a world narrated in
the same way they narrate the world. It is not a jump that all those who
voted for Hillary were able to make, not by choice but because they
were already living elsewhere. Both narrative realms are variously
plotted and valued but the grounding force separating them seems clearly
to be an enormous wealth divide and the long term consequences of that.
In a simplified and also over generalized way, we have a meritocratic,
professionalized, dividend recipient story/reality frame over here and
over there we have a narrative world we’ve not been inclined to narrate
until Trump won the election.

The disinclination or disinterest has of course been on the side of
those who have been before the advent of The Web in a gatekeeper
position to narrate the world we are all in from their perspective. What
that has meant in terms of the politics of narrative is that a good
deal of frustration was built up in those whose stories of the world
were impeded by not being disseminated. At the same time it meant that
the Impeding Gatekeepers had encased themselves in a bubble of their own
selective narrating, confining themselves to a selective vision of
things which excluded, as we now know, those 78% who live on wages that
have remained flat forever.

The fact that Donald J. Trump is now president of the United States
is astounding and troubling to this rarefied zone faction unacquainted
with the lines of the story he seems to be following. They are, however,
more unacquainted with those who are loyal to Trump and remain so.
These Trumpians live in a life-world that remains opaque and unknown to
those whose own life-world distinguishes itself by excluding such
recognition and such knowledge.

Those who are not drawn to the slogan “Make America Great Again” are
already enjoying the present America. And if they live in gated
communities, one of the reasons they do so is avoid contact with those
unhappy, disgruntled by their present status in America. In a politics
of narrative world, this unacquaintance signals surprise if this unhappy
faction reaches visibility on the national stage. More accurately, they
have reached that visibility via both Trump and The Web of cyberspace.
Trump continues to communicate with his followers on Twitter because he
did not reach the presidency and they did not reach visibility by the
paths of “governing principles” already cordoned off to them.